Re: A Little Research Goes a Long Way
Of course they're not going to make the Poweranything a desktop chip, it's too goddamn hot, expensive and power sucking. They're going to create a Power4 derivative, what makes you think that they would stick the Power4 in an Apple machine?
Originally posted by Anecdoter
First, before anyone gets too excited, has anyone bothered to look at what IBM charges for a RS/6000 based system (PowerPC based)?
Check out this link: http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/workstations/
The price starts out at nearly $9,000 (not including monitor) for a 250 mhz PowerPC 604E processor, 128 mb of RAM, 9.1 GB of hard drive space (SCSI) and a 10/100 ethernet card.
The 450 mhz Power3-II (64-bit, copper, one processor) starts at $13,000 (monitor not included). That includes 512mb of RAM and up to 4mb of L2 cache.
Now, who actually believes this new Power4 chip will be inexpensive enough for even the highend Power Macs? My GUESS (and I make no claim to have any insider information) is that if Apple uses these chips, they will be for a new tier of workstations aimed a video animation/production and priced accordingly. The current G4 Power Mac line will probably be retained to serve as the consumer desktop line and will have incremental updates, possibly even the G5.
For more information on the Power4 chip, here's the IBM link:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/whitepapers/power4.html#chip
Of course they're not going to make the Poweranything a desktop chip, it's too goddamn hot, expensive and power sucking. They're going to create a Power4 derivative, what makes you think that they would stick the Power4 in an Apple machine?